Not Me?

I’ve been nervous. In two months’ time my luck runs out: my fellowship comes to an end, and though I’ve scattered applications for adjunct teaching, fellowships, jobs, and residencies all over the country, I fear that in the next few weeks I’ll receive only slender white envelopes of narrow rejection in return. A flurry of them, like so many SASEs from those literary journal submissions I also scatter around the country when I’m feeling plucky. Yes, the life I have chosen is one of rejection, hustling, and cobbling together work. I get it. I work hard, and I’m always looking for more work, but sometimes the phishing scams masquerading as jobs on Craigslist get me down. I’m one of those people who needs health insurance, and I don’t really want to leave my little attic apartment with built-in bookshelves and pockets of quiet and big south-facing kitchen windows. Just a couple of nights ago, at a taquería with my sister and a friend, I suddenly became overwhelmed by the noisy terror of the future, the student loans, the credit card bills, the prospect of arriving in a new town alone and staying there alone, the financial inadequacy of full-time retail plus part-time food service industry, I turned to a table of children squealing at an Ipad and, get this, shushed them.

The next morning I walked along the Pacific Ocean with the friend, another writer on her way to something new, and we spoke of entrusting ourselves to our own lives. We decided to give the universe no choice but to align in some way. The applications are out there, waiting to transform into substance, and no matter what, we know how to work. Soft rosy water puddled up in the light, and in the sand, seabird wings lay half-buried and a hermit crab died without dignity. I was still ashamed for silencing the children’s joy. My friend observed that the scrubby tops of the hills, their gentle descent into the sea, looked like the crumbs on top of a coffeecake. So perfectly plain an image. I thought of that Eileen Myles, whose words on the writer-hustle I guess I’d already been thinking of anyway.

In her “poet’s novel,” Inferno, Eileen Myles writes about the various jobs she takes on to offset the cost of life: selling counterfeit subway slugs, mild prostitution, and my favorite, picking apples in upstate New York. This last episode is perhaps the most demoralizing: Myles calculates, in her casual way, that the job costs her more money than she earns doing it. After she’s taken a bus upstate and paid for a hotel room and a pack of cigarettes, and found that she has to buy herself dinner, she’s out the money she’s made picking up bruised dropped apples and sorting them in baskets. She calls the chapter “Drops.” Losses cut.

“I often think about what my girlfriend said (which is on a napkin on my bulletin board over my desk) when she wondered “how palatable will women have to make themselves as artists in this depression.” It’s a depression the size of the world and we fill it by thinking about it I believe.”

That evening my sister and friend and I ate more burritos and read poems from Not Mealoud. I let Myles’s declarative sentences, rough and unmeasured by commas, land in the room like the contents of a pocket emptied on a coffee table–keys, change, wallet, dust–necessary, daily objects. Myles’s words didn’t tamp down my worry, but I think they articulated my fears in the voice I needed to hear. We read “Peanut Butter” twice, just because it’s so good. Rejection, uncertainty, fear–these things are tough. But Peter Pan brand peanut butter–and other cheap pleasures–are pretty good. Myles reassures us that we aren’t imagining it: we are humans with hungry needs, taking tiny steps in the path of the Sun. No big deal. Take the ride, Myles tells us. Let’s get right down to it:

Gina Balibrera is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers' Program and was a Zell Postgraduate Fellow in Prose at the University of Michigan in 2013-2014. Gina lives in Ann Arbor, where she works at a bookstore, teaches writing at the University of Michigan, and is finishing a novel set in 1930s El Salvador and France.

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